Nowhere Man

Ah, yes, Nowhere Man. Back in the heady days of '94, or was it '95, I remember watching this show on UPN. A new network had been launched, and new shows were filling the airways. As it was filmed in and around Portland, Oregon, I always liked identifying the sights, especially when he was in 'Boston' or 'Washington, D.C.' or some other major city. Of course, UPN, being run by thick-headed dolts (or maybe monkeys, I've always thought they might be part of those million monkeys), cancelled it before we found out what was REALLY going on (though it apparently involved clones of Senators).

Of course, its constant imminent demise did not prevent my friends and me from enjoying it. Indeed, we speculated on what would happen if it was crossed with the The X-files, though the best that we could come up with was a title, either The Nowhere Files or X-Man. Needless to say, we preferred the latter.

I think the show was first broadcast on Sky One starting in about 1994 here in England, and as the writeups above said, viewers were left with no idea what was going on when the series was cancelled without warning.

Sky Magazine published a viewer's query about the show and in their reply they stated that the show's producers had 'run out of money' but that the show would continue later in the year.

Of course, the series never surfaced again on Sky One.

Four or five years later, I was flicking through the channels for something to watch and I found the first episode of Nowhere Man on one of those channels that only ever shows repeats (/re-runs).

I got into the series again and watched up to where it ran to the first time around, and much to my surprise, they still advertised next week's show.

Apparently UPN did finish making the series, but by the time they'd realised what a huge mistake they'd made in cancelling it, Sky One saw no point in resuming the series and had already slipped a different show into Nowehere Man's former time slot.

I personally think that the writers chose the perfect ending to the series, considering that so many possible alternatives existed. I also think that the show ended at the right time. I'd hate to have seen it drag on forever like the X-Files...

Then again, I could be wrong, people have been decyphering the character for over 30 years. The character and the movie are described as an open-ened rohrshcach. Personally I imagined him as being a hitchhiker with a beard, not as something out of The Phantom Tollbooth.

Next time I see p_i in the chatterbox, I'll have to ask him what he thinks of this hoopy frood.